Thursday, April 10, 2025
12:00-1:30 pm, Smith Warehouse, A101, Bay 12
As early as October 1953, seven months after Stalin's death, Izvestia, the second major Soviet newspaper, complained about the color deficiency in Soviet homes, streets, and cities: "Our people are rightly concerned that the blandness of our color palette does not quite match the brightness of our lives." Over the next two decades, the facades of various structures became the main platforms for diverse socio-aesthetic experiments. The strategic alteration of their color schemes was perceived as an easy and quick way to achieve impressive transformations of the material environment and its emotional perception. This talk brings together several cases of such transformations in plants and factories throughout the country in the 1960s. All of these cases reflected the same striking belief in an essential and fundamental connection between "real beauty" (podlinnaia krasota) on the one hand, and "usefulness and rationality" on the other. With these materials, I hope to reconstruct a consistent cultural trend. The notion of beauty (or the beautiful), for all its vagueness and generality, was concrete enough to provide the "enthusiasts of industrial aesthetics" (as they would later be called) with a tangible and solid point of departure for their aesthetic activism. In no time, these enthusiasts would expand their initial basic concern with beauty into a much broader aesthetic approach that required a systemic and stylistic coordination of color, light, things, people, and spaces. Episodic chromatic interventions, isolated efforts to improve and update individual workplaces, led to large-scale crusades for the all-encompassing "culture of production and daily life".
Serguei Alex. Oushakine is Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages at Princeton. His latest publications include a monograph on early Soviet photomontage and a co-edited volume on the pedagogy of images in early Soviet books for children. Currently, Oushakine chairs the department of Anthropology and directs the Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
